While constant one-liners were a bit leaden on B4.DA.$$, they are sorely missed on AABA.

While it doesn’t break much new musical ground, and plays against Future Islands’ reputation for excess, The Far Field’s breathtaking sorrow is transformative.

Adios sounds more like Hola. Nearly 15 years into his career, Branan sounds like he’s finally found the right balance between audacity and subtlety, between humor and heartbreak.

While it doesn’t have quite the artistic heft of his self-titled album, the bright, punched-out shapes are more fun to listen to, with an emotional accessibility that makes me imagine a kind of post-rave Eluvium.

They arrive at the settled creative space they’ve hinted at but never quite reached in the past.

Diet Cig’s debut is almost entirely made of other people’s gestures hastily collected and cheaply executed.

After that opening suite--“Pure Comedy,” “Total Entertainment Forever,” and “Revolution”--the music settles into a tonal plateau. Even the most gripping songs unspool with acoustic leisure, and they can be long and lofty trips.

One does get the sense of life behind these performances, of private experience refracted through universal sentiment, of hard knocks transubstantiated into easy wisdom, but, as is often the case with Bob Dylan, the drama remains mostly internal.

It’s a Myth is the natural progression from Gymnastics, and so across the record, Moolchan refines her sound within these limits. Inside and outside of the music, she embraces the self-built space that she crafted for herself.

The discoveries Ghersi makes on Arca allow him to write his most relaxed and intimate songs. His work is still mysterious, but not as opaque--it doesn’t keep you at an arm’s length, instead he offers up his pleasures more readily.

Rosebudd’s Revenge isn’t as seamless as Marcberg or Reloaded, suffering from some fidelity issues and perhaps being a bit back-loaded, but it’s endlessly, almost impossibly entertaining.

Deep into their career, Dieng at times reveals the advanced stage of its players. The songs are taken a step slower, the rhumbas show a consideration for the pulse as well as the spaces between them, and the themes in some manner or another touch upon mortality.

There are a few spots on Silver/Lead where Wire succumbs to its own subtlety, as words empty and the tempos deflate toward flatness. But the group catches itself quickly, producing the album’s best track, “Sleep on the Wing.”

They’re still figuring it out, but somehow, even their mistakes feel fresh.

Rather You Than Me is a smooth, enjoyable attempt to wrestle the spotlight back onto his solo work.

Freed from the desire to make people move, Joakim put together a record that’s unified in its oddity.

Brood X’s quiet closers are no less visceral than their high-voltage predecessors, providing a more intimate manifestation of the agitated feelings coursing throughout the record.

Juxtaposing elegant chamber folk against the discord of lives out of balance, it’s musically more delicate than even her soft rock models.

Without fail, whenever a song on Emperor of Sand feels like it’s about to go overboard on the polish, the band takes it in a more jagged direction. Conversely, whenever a song runs close to rehashing Mastodon’s familiar bag of tricks, the band steps up its tastefulness and songcraft. The timing is so uncanny that you might not even notice.

In the Same Room is spacious and restrained, at times offering concentrates of the songs’ emotive fundamentals. It’s also further occasion for Holter to sharpen material or else mine it for new meaning.

As if to stabilize its weighty subject matter, Let the Dancers Inherit the Party is a remarkably steady album, at times to a fault.

The album straddles a line between being thin and casual, at times pulling back the curtain on the finished product to show Nabay chatting, humming, and tapping out the building blocks of the songs to his bandmates.

For the most part, Sorcerer succeeds, moving their sound forward while maintaining their penchant for detours.

Throughout the album, he’s haunted by both the things that have and haven’t happened to him, what he has and hasn’t done, ruminating over a tight 32 minutes across eight tracks that feel haunted even at their hardest.

Pile could have remained in their amorphous realm of rock, but they needed to grow up. Here, as musicians, they did.

Undertow finds Wolf Eyes a bit tamer than usual, shoehorning their concrète-tinged racket to more conventional melodic paradigms. They’ve mostly done away with the bluesy flirtations this time around, instead applying a wrecking ball to the spacious, lush frameworks of world music, ambient, and even reggae.

Galás’ sense of dynamics is all the more moving when you sort of know how the song’s supposed to go.

Sacred Paws have arrived, on the back of a troubled groove: a little preoccupied, maybe, but ready to dance.